Military Movies - Military Times

Burn after viewing

In recent years, Hollywood has taken the bait-and-switch to soaring new heights when it comes to movie trailers. It’s gotten so you can be forgiven for wondering if the trailer you saw yesterday was really for the same movie you’re seeing today.

The new standard-bearer for this little con game is the trailer for “Burn After Reading,” Joel and Ethan Coen’s follow-up to their highly acclaimed “No Country for Old Men.”

Its trailer makes “Burn After Reading” look like pure screwball farce, a la the Coens’ 1987 classic, “Raising Arizona.” But it turns out to be far different — a bleak, shallow, sour and, at times, plodding riff on the paranoia-tinged times in which we live.

The story focuses on five people and the contrived ways in which their lives intersect. First up is Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a foul-mouthed, foul-tempered CIA analyst who is told he’s being demoted and shipped to the State Department (a spook’s Siberia).

So he quits, telling his aghast wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), a brittle, hard-edged, appearance-conscious pediatrician, that maybe he’ll write a memoir.

Katie is having an affair with married Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), who claims to be a U.S. marshal, and Oz’s swift fall from grace and high income gives her the incentive to make a break. So she downloads Oz’s files — his financial documents as well as his memoir notes — and burns them to a CD for use in the upcoming divorce proceeding.

But Harry suddenly gets cold feet; he may be a cad (in fact, he’s a serial philanderer, hooking up with a parade of lonely women through an Internet dating service), but he doesn’t really want to leave his wife.

Then, fitness center yutzes Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) and Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) find the disc with Oz’s files in their facility’s locker room, accidentally dropped there by Katie’s divorce lawyer’s secretary.

They soon realize the disc holds secret CIA-type stuff — “the raw intelligence,” says nitwit Chad. The only slightly less clueless Linda sees a clear blackmail path to the money for the liposuction, nose job, face tuck and breast enlargement that she feels she needs to maintain her over-40 career in the fitness industry.

Even as these five doofuses become ever-more-tightly ensnared in a web of their own greed, need and stupidity — in unfunny ways to no discernable end — the actors playing them are too good to be totally unwatchable. But it’s still tough to accept such talent in such utterly ridiculous roles.

Clearly, the Coens want to wax profound about intelligence — in terms of both the brainpower of individuals (or, more specifically, lack of same) as well as the collective “intelligence” of our homeland security bureaucracy.

But they’re too busy goofing off to convey that message coherently, as evidenced by two incongruous and brutally graphic jolts of violence as well as a silly visual sex joke that will wring some giggles from viewers but has zippo to do with the story.

I’m a huge Coen fan, but this one left me cold. There’s no profundity in the antics of these goofballs, and the Coens’ message remains frustratingly opaque right up to the closing scene at CIA headquarters, which finally hints that it all has to do with the idea that only sheer, blind luck has kept America and its generally clueless citizenry safe since 9/11.

Um, OK. And … ?

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Rated R for language, violence and sexuality. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com.

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